Peculiar Ground. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
A great concourse of women. At its centre stood Meg Leafield. And so, the only male in sight, did the boy who threw a ball at me. Meg seemed to be pulling at his clothes.
‘You’ve been here,’ said Rose.
‘I have.’
‘You recognise that boy.’
‘You know that I have seen him before. He knocked me down.’
‘But do you understand who he is?’
I stared, mute.
‘He’s Cecily’s boy,’ said Rose. ‘Edward.’
The boy Edward’s shirt was off. The women were handing garments to Meg. He stood quiescent in his breeches. Meg helped him gently into new clothes far finer than those he had shed.
A lawn shirt. Stockings and high boots. An embroidered waistcoat and a sky-blue coat. I saw what was being done. My hands were shaking.
‘His cousin, then,’ I said. ‘They seem to be of an age.’
‘We must stop this,’ said Rose.
He scrambled to his feet and ran aslant down the slope, as clumsy as a charging boar, trampling small branches and sending stones clattering. I followed.
The other women looked round startled but Meg was unperturbed. Rose leapt the last few feet, and landed amongst them, impelled forward like a falling rock by the speed of his own going. He is a stocky man, broad-beamed and short-legged. I was almost as nonplussed by his urgency now as the women were. I slipped and scrambled after him with dread shadowing my mind and chilling my limbs.
My circuitous return from this spot two days previously had allowed me to calculate its position in relation to the great house, and to the course of the stream. Not far from where we stood is a pond, much obscured by bulrushes, but nevertheless tolerably deep. This pond is the embryo from which one of my lakes will grow. From the height where we had lain in hiding I had seen it glint.
Rose had Meg by the shoulders and was shaking her. I would have restrained him, but the women were quicker. They haled him off her and wrapped themselves around him, disabling him as a great sea-monster might disable a ship by embracing it with its tentacles. I hung back. Meg stepped up to me and to my astonishment took me gently by the hand.
‘Your friend misunderstands us. We intend no harm to this boy, as we have done no harm to the other.’
‘I am at a loss,’ I said. ‘I am as puzzled by your proceedings as I am ignorant of what interpretation Mr Rose would put upon them.’
‘He thinks we are witches,’ she said, the last word uttered with derision.
Rose, still under restraint, was shaking his head vigorously.
‘I sincerely doubt it,’ I said. ‘Mr Rose is a scientist. He loves lucidity, and measures the world with set-square and rule. He is not one to babble of sorcery.’
‘Perhaps not, but he thinks that we are.’
Someone stepped out of the gaggle of onlookers and took my other arm. It was Cecily. ‘I will subdue him,’ she said to Meg.
And so she did. With her hand in the crook of my elbow I quieted. A man in love is as spiritless as a lapdog. She took me to a heap of logs, and sat upon it beside me. We watched in silence as Meg finished dressing the boy.
‘Say what you will,’ I said to Cecily sotto voce, ‘this is a kind of conjuring.’
The boy, Edward, was now the living copy of his dead cousin. He gazed steadily at Cecily, who inclined her head as though in approbation.
‘Who is his father?’ I asked. It was unmannerly. All this mystification made me tart.
‘In the community in which I was raised all children were loved by all. All the men were their fathers.’ Her voice was low and even.
‘That is not an answer.’
‘I agree with you.’
‘Then who?’
‘What is your motive for enquiring?’
‘I aspire to be your husband. I would know who you are.’
Her gaze was still fixed upon the boy.
‘Lest I shame you?’
I made no reply, but waited.
‘Mr Norris, I will not be questioned.’ Cecily stood and took young Edward by the hand. They went together in the direction of the pond. Meg led the other women after, Rose captive among them. I stayed, ignored.
A gang of masons was coming along the track from the quarry. Great blocks of stone, granular like gigantic sugar lumps, rocked on makeshift carts – tree-trunks laid over the axles of solid wooden wheels. Men stood on or by them, watching the ropes, ready to holler out if one of these man-made boulders showed a tendency to shift. The six horses were as heavy-built as bulldogs and twelve times as tall and long. The strength and sweat being expended on giving Lord Woldingham his privacy would serve to construct a sizeable town.
Saplings of hazel and elder screened the one group from the other. Only from my standpoint was it possible to see men and women both. A man rocking atop a boulder, like a seaman balancing on a spar, gave a shout. The women startled and froze, only Cecily and young Edward walking on oblivious.
The men moved into action with awful slowness. The horses were halted; wooden chocks were wedged behind the wheels to stop the cart and its load rolling backwards. The men, whose legs and arms were already sheathed in leather (quarrying is dangerous work), shrugged their jerkins on, despite the warmth of the day. Deliberately, they picked up clubs or knotted ropes. Cecily and the boy had crossed the track now, and were silhouetted against the green water.
The men barged through the undergrowth. The group of women tightened. I saw Rose shake himself free and step forward, a silly little tub of a man. These men were his team. He raised both arms, as though surrendering to them, or inviting an embrace. They divided, and passed him by, as stream-water passes by a saturated log. As they approached the women they were wagging the tongues in their mouths in a song that was no song. Dig a dig a dig a dig a dig a dig. Guttural. The human voice used not to communicate, but to terrorise.
I knew that to intervene would be useless, but I ran forward yelling with all the breath in me and waving my arms as though to fight off a swarm of wasps. I had not breakfasted. Tiny coloured sparks seemed to obscure my vision. As the clubs began to pound and the ropes to whack, I saw Cecily and Edward, his coat as brilliant as speedwells in the grass, step from the verge into the pond. They neither paused nor looked back. The water was still. Clear of the shadowy wood, their figures were brightly illuminated. I could see them plain, from the paired chestnut heads to the wooden heels of their sturdy shoes. Beneath, their reflections hung from them, suspended upside down, foot-sole from foot-sole. They stepped on the surface of the water as easily as though it were clear green glass.
All the smells in the changing hut were peculiar. Indoor smells were warm – floor-wax, ironed sheets, toast. Outdoor ones were fresh and wet. These fell into neither category. There was the urinous whiff from the rush matting. The tang of creosote. Rubbery smells from bathing caps and the thick soles of sandals. The dusty breath of the high yew hedges, the aura of the overhanging pine trees, which smelt nothing like her father’s pine shaving soap and whose needles covered the ground behind the hut with a carpet which was at once prickly, if an upturned needle spiked your foot, and as silky as vegetable fur.
Nell and her brother came almost every morning. It had to be mornings because by the time they’d digested their lunch the tall